Books published by Ginninderra Press

In this compelling collection, eighty-nine writers traverse their particular territory of loss and bring back travellers' tales. Their skilfully crafted accounts are insightful, inspiring, amusing, heart-breaking, resilient and, above all, damn good reading.'This beautiful collection of writings explores the landscape of loss. It will meet you where you are. You'll find yourself reaching for particular pieces that somehow articulate how you're feeling, even before you've found the words to express it yourself… May this book become both a friend and a warm companion.' - Petrea King, Quest for Life Centre

Leylines is Katherine Buchanan's first book of poetry. It presents a selection of poems that either touch on the physical environment and our impact on it or provide the reader with a glimpse into a less tangible, somewhat ethereal, inner world. Imagery of the Rena oil spill disaster, for example, is hauntingly presented in 'Bay of Plenty', and 'Nomura' provides some insight into an issue with gargantuan jellyfish reaching the Sea of Japan, which have even been known to block seawater pumps used to cool nuclear reactors. Poems like 'Leylines' and 'Spiral Dance' remind the reader that there is still beauty and potential in the natural world. As Katherine says in 'Seasons', the natural cycle continues.

A collection of exuberantly comic verses about a magical kingdom in which live a variety of birds and animals. Vividly illustrated by a talented new artist. Ideal for reading aloud to young children.

No chemist, no bank, no library, even in primary or secondary school, and no mains electricity until the writer turned fifteen. Some might say he was disadvantaged. But from the perspective of some city children today he was far from being deprived.Mallee Roots is an account of the rich community culture of Walpeup, a small, remote Mallee town in the years 1942 to 1956. Isolated from bigger centres by gravel roads and distance, life demanded a high degree of interdependence and sharing. Occasionally it was in grief but regularly in fun. Until he left, the author encountered no apparent differences in status or wealth. He found plenty of things to do and boundless opportunity to get into trouble, but later, to work side by side with adults and become more responsible.As well as describing his relationships with townspeople and farmers, the writer paints an affectionate picture of a father who was always on his children's side. For the mother, life brought fewer rewards in the town and before that, during the Depression on a struggling farm with no domestic amenities.To compensate for the routines of school life, the author caused more mischief than is reasonable but not enough to prevent completion of high school and his departure, ultimately to train teachers like those he gave so much grief. Funny, informative, Mallee Roots gives a unique view of community strength, something now not always attainable.

As the title suggests, this collection of short stories focuses on a variety of unusual but not atypical emotional and life-style reactions people experience as a result of guilt, compassion, indiscretion, abuse, jealousy, fantasy, loss, sense of mission, and impending death. It provides insight into the strange nature of what it means to be human.

Two Green Parrots positions our lives in a broader, ecological context. Anne M. Carson's poems affirm human culture and values in the face of implacable realties. Beauty and suffering are skilfully interwoven to create poems with the meditative power to move and sustain.'Anne Carson's rich lyric poems are the product of a sharp eye, alert to any particular bird, tree or loving gesture. We can almost hear her human subjects, fully alive in their world. In it, love commands a dancing harmony of language, for Anne Carson's poetry is also music. And her pastoral is immensely detailed. Hers is the art of attentive inspiration. For any reader at all, she will articulate delight.' - Chris Wallace Crabbe, poet'With a painterly eye, Carson's gaze directs a catalogue of beauty and grief in poems that revel in lyric description of birds, foliage, clouds, rivers, seedpods and trees. Meditative and magisterial, these poems turn to art and music, as well as nature, to list under the weight of human love, tenderness and loss. Slow time accrues.' - Shari Kocher, poet

Cruel, backward, isolationist, and fanatically religious-or independent, resourceful, principled, and courageous? This book is about the Boers of the Transvaal; it is about how they were formed, their relentless territorial expansion at the expense of indigenous groups in both the Cape Colony and the Transvaal, their struggle for distinctiveness and independence against Imperial and African pressures, the state that they carved out for themselves, and their abject defeat in the Anglo-Boer War. It is also about how the experiences and world view of the Transvaal Boers shaped the myth and laid the platform for 'Boerdom resurgent' (or the Afrikaner ascent) in apartheid South Africa.

'The verse novel genre is ideal for poet and fiction writer Jill Gloyne to convey the rapidly changing life of Jim McFarlane. Through a series of tragedies his old self is shed like the bark of the trees around him revealing a new mask that is both a curse and a key. And like the tender young shoots that grow after a bushfire, love slowly grows back around him. Jill Gloyne's life in regional Australia ensures authentic and memorable rural characters and settings. Join her on this journey of transformation, a rough ride for Jim McFarlane but a rewarding one for lovers of language and genuine stories.' - Jude Aquilina

Sarah Tiffen's third book of poetry is full of the sensual imagery and textured observations for which she is becoming known. The sense of place and people resonates in these stories of life and love, connection to land, the struggle to survive, to belong, to reconcile. Here is Australian work, exploring Australian themes, familiar, yet renewed. There is something for everyone in this collection - work that can be read and reread to enjoy the subtleties and the beauty of the language, the depth of the narrative line. In the words of Donald Hall, fourteenth American poet laureate, 'Sarah Tiffen is writing some beautiful stuff.' 'Rain Event in the Whispering Country', which appears in this collection, was selected for publication in Best Poems of 2008 (UQP).

Sarah Tiffen's second collection continues to probe the spiritual and social themes revealed in her first book, Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland. Stories of her home country, in the western plains of New South Wales, reveal a powerful response to place and a visceral sense of nostalgia, landscape and love. With story-poems, nature poems and spiritual explorations, this collection will speak to the reader of Australia, of a passing way of life, of family and history, and of the notions of home, time and loss and spirituality. Representing a development of the writer's craft, there is much in this volume to compel, challenge and uplift, as the reader will again take a journey into the heart, and share the love of language and of the country in evocative imagery.

Learning Country: Song Cycles from the Heartland is Sarah Tiffen's first collection of poetry. A lifetime of writing poetry has evolved to produce work of sometimes epic proportion, which explores a genuine Australian identity, imbued with history, spirituality and a sense of time and place, and evoking and celebrating the fabric of rural life. The 'songs' create a beautiful, evocative narrative of this life and these times, which is also timeless. And the reader is acutely aware of the omnipresence of the landscape itself, and nature, as the defining physical and spiritual entity in shaping identity. Centred on the life and landscape of farming communities in western NSW, in particular the author's home town of Leeton in the Riverina and its surrounding districts, these are celebratory stories of ordinary people and the spirituality that is inherent in the everyday, the things that may be lost if we don't try to record them imaginatively - the myths of an immigrant culture excavated, resurrected, critiqued. Learning Country may remind readers that poetry can be a map into ourselves, and that the journey is as important as the destination.

A very enjoyable new collection of delightfully quirky but exhilaratingly thought-provoking short poems from this popular and versatile writer, who lives on the New South Wales south coast.

Beautifully crafted by a prize winning author, these wonderful stories resonate with humanity - its subtleties, omissions, follies and frailties. This is a powerful Australian voice, adept at creating a lattice of the unsaid. The characters have experiences we can connect to, drawing us to see beyond the surface.Acutely observed settings and juxtapositions reveal the complexity of life. A boy builds a model solar system while his world falls apart; a reviled outcast searches for a Christmas gift; a young constable confronts ugliness in a beautiful landscape. Thieves, farmers, prison guards, real estate agents, factory workers, surfers, storm-drenched characters in a tinny - human hearts behind the mask and the uniform.J. S. Scholz's writing has won many prestigious awards, and been published as far afield as Norway. Now, a unique selection of his stories is gathered here - small islands in a big sea.